We want a language that’s open source, with a liberal license. We want
the speed of C with the dynamism of Ruby. We want a language that’s
homoiconic, with true macros like Lisp, but with obvious, familiar
mathematical notation like Matlab. We want something as usable for
general programming as Python, as easy for statistics as R, as
natural for string processing as Perl, as powerful for linear algebra as
Matlab, as good at gluing programs together as the shell. Something
that is dirt simple to learn, yet keeps the most serious hackers happy.
We want it interactive and we want it compiled.
(Did we mention it should be as fast as C?)
Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski,
Viral B. Shah, Alan Edelman